Fox Hunting and Political Evasion

Boxing Day is a significant date in the fox-hunting calendar.

Foxes are unaware of this, moving through hedgerows and fields largely unseen, doing what wild animals do in winter, trying to survive. Meanwhile, groups of people are preparing for what they describe as a “cultural activity” centred on the pursuit and killing of a wild animal.

I am a country woman, born and bred. My father was a farmer to the bone and worked the land long after his body told him to stop. He had no time for fox hunts or terrier men, and if he found them on our farm, he chased them off.

He owned a gun and used it only rarely, and with reluctance. He understood the difference between necessity and cruelty.

Opposition to hunting with dogs is often dismissed as urban squeamishness or a lack of understanding of rural life. This is a convenient deflection, and it sidesteps the substance of the argument. It tries to turn a question about cruelty into a question about cultural identity. My upbringing tells a different story.

There is a clear cognitive dissonance at work in the defence of fox hunting. Many of those who justify it also insist they love animals and respect the countryside. Yet they participate in, or excuse, the prolonged pursuit and killing of a wild animal for pleasure. To live with that contradiction, they cloak the activity in softer language such as tradition, pest control and trail hunting. These are stories people tell themselves to make it seem acceptable.

I don’t claim moral superiority over people who hunt for food. If anything, they confront the reality of killing more directly than many of us who eat meat, while remaining distant from the process. What distinguishes fox hunting is not that an animal dies, but that the killing serves no necessary purpose. The animal is pursued not to be eaten, but to be caught for pleasure. Oscar Wilde once described fox hunting as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”.

Fox hunting often proceeds as if access to land confers a right to hunt for sport. That attitude has roots in an older social order, when sporting rights were usually retained by landowners regardless of who lived or worked the land. The law has changed, but attitudes have not always kept pace. There is no legal right to hunt over land without permission, yet consent can still be treated as an inconvenience rather than a requirement.

Northern Ireland is now the only part of the UK where hunting wild animals with dogs remains legal. In December 2021, John Blair MLA introduced the Hunting of Wild Mammals Bill. This was a concrete proposal that would have made hunting wild mammals with dogs an offence and closed off the familiar trail hunting escape route. It did so without affecting normal farming, pest control or other lawful rural activities, and it created clear offences and penalties.

A public consultation had already taken place, and a clear majority of respondents supported a ban. Despite this, the bill was blocked before its details could even be examined through committee scrutiny.

The bill was defeated. Every Sinn Féin MLA voted against it.

The full voting record is available in the official Assembly minutes.

In 2021, Sinn Féin sought to position itself on both sides of the argument at the same time. By claiming support for animal welfare in principle while unanimously voting against legislation to protect wild animals, Sinn Féin managed the issue rather than confronting it.

The party effectively reassured those who defend hunting that nothing would change, while offering opponents verbal concern without legislative action. This was not an abstention, a free vote or a matter of conscience, but a collective party decision that kept Northern Ireland out of step with established animal welfare protections elsewhere.

For voters who expect Sinn Féin to act against unnecessary harm, this is important to notice. John Blair has indicated that he intends to bring forward legislation again in early 2026.

It is also worth noting that other parties handled the vote differently. The DUP allowed a free vote. Many of its MLAs opposed the bill, but some supported it. If dissent was possible elsewhere, Sinn Féin supporters are entitled to ask why it was not permitted here.

Credit is due where it belongs. John Blair and those MLAs who supported the bill, from Alliance, the Greens, the SDLP, the UUP and the independent benches, were prepared to back a simple principle, that hunting wild animals with dogs has no place in a modern society. Their votes showed that opposition to blood sports cuts across party lines and across the rural and urban divide.

Claims that modern hunts are merely trail hunting warrant serious scepticism. Trail hunting involves hounds following a scent laid by humans, yet former foxhunts continue to deploy large packs of dogs.  Once packs of this size pick up a live scent, control becomes extremely difficult in practice. The continued presence of terrier men only underlines how little has really changed.

Inaction has real consequences here because wild animals have no voice of their own. Many people care about wildlife, but on this issue, that concern has not translated into action. Meanwhile, other organisations have been actively making sure things stay the same. Groups such as the Countryside Alliance work to turn this into a dispute about culture and identity rather than a question of animal welfare. I see this as a deliberate strategy to ensure nothing changes.

Without pressure from those who oppose it, hunting wild animals with dogs continues, simply because it always has.

This issue is still live and will be revisited in early 2026. When it does return, the question will no longer be whether hunting with dogs should be examined, but whether parties are willing to allow that examination to happen. If you believe animal welfare matters, now is the time to raise this with your MLA and ask a simple question. If this bill comes back, will it be allowed proper scrutiny, or blocked again at the first hurdle?

You can add your voice to the call for change by signing the petition to end hunting with dogs in Northern Ireland organised jointly by the USPCA and League Against Cruel Sports.

Much of what persists in politics does so not because it is widely supported, but because it goes unchallenged. Pressure does work, and ordinary voters do have leverage when they choose to use it.

Tradition alone is not a moral defence. Some traditions deserve to end.